ABOLITION NOW & THEN
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- Published: Saturday, August 06, 2022 11:35
- by John Campbell
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I grew up in a small town in central New York named Peterboro. The town consists of one square block with a village green on one street. There were and still are less than 200 people living there and it is still a small quiet bedroom community. While growing up there the surrounding area was small dairy farms which have mostly disappeared now. Many of the farms have been combined into large corporate farms and you can still see fields of corn and oats and barley. The history of this little town is large though since it was a center for the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Garret Smith housed runaway slaves on the third floor of his mansion until he could provide travel to Canada. Any slave caught as a runaway had to be returned to their owner according to Federal law so Mr. Smith and anyone helping the slaves to escape were criminal and prosecuted if caught. As a child we learned about this and became proud of our heritage along with many of the ancestors of the freed slaves that lived there.